Saturday, November 28, 2015

Letter From College

PROVIDENCE — Fourteen faculty, staff, and former staff members at Rhode Island College are asking the state to fire the college president.

The group wrote last week to the Council on Postsecondary Education, which is conducting an annual review of president Nancy Carriuolo.

The letter alleges Carriuolo is not paying enough attention to school finances, does not collaborate with appropriate staff, and terminates or penalizes people because of unsubstantiated rumors or honest professional disagreements, among other issues.

It says the college ‘‘barely resembles’’ the spirited, student-focused, highly productive institution it once was and Carriuolo ‘‘must go.’’

Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the bond rating for the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education in March.

It said the downgrade reflected the credit quality of both Rhode Island College and the University of Rhode Island....They sure have their problems down there.

Two student debt consolidation companies have agreed to stop doing business in Massachusetts to settle allegations that the firms misled more than 200 borrowers and charged them high fees for minimal services, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said Tuesday.

The companies, IrvineWebWorks Inc., doing business as Student Loan Processing, and Interactiv Education LLC, doing business as Direct Student Aid, will pay $56,000 and $40,000 respectively to settle allegations that they misrepresented their ties to the federal government and their abilities to arrange lower monthly payments for student loans.

In some cases, Healey alleged, students were charged more than $1,000 simply to have the companies complete the federal loan consolidation application — paperwork that student borrowers could fill out online themselves for free.

“Companies that are supposed to be helping students with their loans aren’t doing their jobs,” Healey said at a news conference. “A new cottage industry has crept in. These are companies that target vulnerable students and market them as able to help them with their debt. The reality is . . . they are left with boatloads of additional fees and debt and are worse off than when they started.”

IrvineWebWorks and Interactiv Education neither admitted nor denied the allegations, according to the settlements. IrvineWebWorks said in court documents that it agreed to the terms to “avoid the uncertainties of litigation.”

The Attorney General’s office alleged that IrvineWebWorks’ subsidiary company, Student Loan Processing, made loans to 94 Massachusetts residents, using misleading advertising and failing to give them information about their right to cancel.

The AG’s office will mail restitution payments to customers, the agreement said. The amount of those payments will be at the AG’s discretion.

Interactiv Education provided credit services to 126 Massachusetts residents through Direct Student Aid, allegedly charging them fees prior to completing services satisfactorily and making misleading offers to its consumers, according to court records. The company’s principal, David Stein, agreed not do business under any name in Massachusetts for the next five years under the terms of the settlement.

Healy encouraged residents who are struggling with student loan terms or in default to contact her office. She said her office has created a Student Loan Assistance Unit and a dedicated hotline for students looking for help....

Derecka Purnell, a black law student, said racism — intentional or otherwise — occurs frequently on campus. But it often takes something as egregious as the tape incident for others to notice.

Issues of race and inclusion have bubbled at Harvard from time to time, but this week they seemed to spill over.Yeah, but isn't that against Asians?Related:"The Nov. 13 Fox Club party was attended by the group’s first-ever class of prospective female members. It included nudity, alcohol, and “women in shark costumes,” according to one alumni member who was not at the party but who said he saw photos taken at the bash. Images from the event circulated on the Internet but were quickly removed, said the member, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of club secrecy rules. The Fox Club, whose members have included T.S. Eliot, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., and Bill Gates, said it believes the school is “unfairly scapegoating the final clubs,” according to a letter from the club’s undergraduate leaders published in the Crimson. In September that there have been concerns about alcohol use, safety, and sexual assaults in the clubs."

In addition to the defaced portraits, a group of law students launched a campaign to remove the school’s seal, which contains the coat of arms of a slaveowner. Students held two protests this week in solidarity with students at the University of Missouri and Yale University, who have demonstrated in response to racial issues on their campuses.Have you heard about the Missouri protests? The controlled-opposition agents creating such things make you want to cry.

This fall, several elite all-male final clubs announced that they would consider admitting women and the university announced it will allow students to select their own gender pronouns.

Last year, in another high-profile step, a group of students launched the “I, too, am Harvard” multimedia campaign that laid bare racial tensions on campus amid what they perceive as its stubborn white, male-dominated culture.Notice how cla$$ is left out of the discussion?

Many students said it is the daily, little-noticed acts of racism that affect their lives the most.

Harvard College senior Brianna Suslovic, an anthropology major from Syracuse, N.Y, said Harvard’s exclusivity can be hard to explain. Often, she said, exclusion is as subtle as social and bureaucratic systems set up in ways familiar to white, upper-middle-class students but foreign to minorities.

Suslovic said many times she has been asked where she went to high school, what extracurricular activities she took part in, as a not-so-subtle way for others to deduce her socioeconomic background. She has heard debates at nearby cafeteria tables about why affirmative action is wrong....At HARVARD!

Anthony Sawyer, a graduate student in public health, said people are listening more now to conversations that minorities have tried to start for years. He described what are known as “microaggressions,” or small actions that demonstrate a biased mind-set, such as “you’re black, but you’re so articulate.”Yeah, forget about the "macroaggressions" of this government (led by many graduates of Harvard!).

At the school of public health, he said, students want to help be part of the solution. Sawyer said he hopes that when the school hires a new dean, it will be someone who takes racial issues seriously. He praised the school for developing a training program against microaggressions.

Amanda Klonsky, a doctoral student in educational leadership who is white, said she was surprised not to receive a university e-mail about the tape incident, which campus police are investigating as a hate crime....

--more--"Such a far cry from the '60s when the kids were demonstrating against the $y$tem and war.

WALTHAM — Hundreds of students at Brandeis University have occupied the administration building that includes the president’s office since Friday, and they vow not to leave until the interim president, Lisa M. Lynch, promises to address their demands pertaining to diversity, including the hiring of additional black faculty and counselors.Now that brings back some memories!

#ConcernedStudents2015, as the group calls itself, started its round-the-clock occupation of the Bernstein-Marcus Administrative Center after Lynch failed to address 13 concerns listed in a letter sent to her on Thursday.

“To hear ‘I’m trying’ and seeing no result is draining,” said William Jones, 20, a sophomore from New York. “It’s a way of mollifying our demands.”

“It had to come to students putting their health, their well-being, on the line to request that the administration live up to its mission,” Nyah Macklin, 21, student body president, said on campus Sunday. “I don’t think the demands are incredibly unachievable.”

The students are calling for an increase in the number of full-time black faculty in all departments to 10 percent, curriculum that would increase racial awareness, annual diversity workshops for faculty, more black school counselors and students, and an office that would investigate student complaints against faculty and staff, among other things.The Jewish college is racist?

On Sunday, a university spokesman said the demands are being reviewed.

“We have told the students we will give their letter careful consideration,” said Bill Schaller, who declined to comment further.

Signs reading “We will not be moved,” “Uplifting the most marginalized uplifts us all,” and “Black faculty at Brandeis is only 1 percent, we demand more” hung from the entrance. “#Ford Hall 2015” signs hung on buildings throughout the campus.What about that other 1 percent? We all saw what happens when you protest them.

Black, white, Asian, and Hispanic students sat on the floor of the administration building’s hallway, many of them drawing signs. Supporters brought the group food, water, and other supplies.

The protest has drawn support from other student groups, such as the Asian American student organization, and the African and Afro-American Studies Department.

“As a department born out of student protest, we believe it is our intellectual and moral obligation to support our students in their struggle to transform Brandeis into a truly 21st century university,” a statement posted to the department’s Facebook page read.

Macklin said Brandeis students were inspired by similar protests launched at colleges across the country, most notably at the University of Missouri, to address racial grievances on campus.Yes, this is starting to smell like a controlled effort to sow racial division across this country for purposes of diversion at best.

Jones said that since he began attending the university he has often been asked how he managed to get into the school — the questioner’s assumption being that he was accepted through an affirmative action program. And as a politics major, he said, he is often asked to speak on the views of President Obama, or others think that because of his race he can be a “testament for anything that affects the black community.”

There was also an incident in which a black student was discouraged from discussing race during a class outside of the Afro and African-American Studies Department.

“When you’re in a class and you’re trying to interject your identity, you’re told you should take an African-American class if you want to talk about race,” Macklin said. “It’s incredibly difficult to operate in these spaces.”

Relations on campus were particularly tense in December and earlier this year after student Khadijah Lynch tweeted that she had “no sympathy” for two New York City police officers who were shot to death as they sat in their patrol car.Related: NYPD Assassination a Psyop?It changed the entire debate!

At the time, Lynch told the Globe that her messages had been taken out of context and said the comments reflected a raw anger and frustration after the police-involved shooting death of a 12-year-old black boy in Cleveland and grand jury decisions in Missouri and New York to not indict white police officers in the deaths of unarmed black men.

Related: "In Cleveland on Sunday, family members of a 12-year-old black boy who was carrying a pellet gun when he was shot and killed by a white police officer gathered for a vigil a year after his death. People prayed and observed a moment of silence at the Cudell Recreation Center area where Tamir Rice was shot a year ago. Some 60 people, including his mother and sister, took part in a commemoration there Saturday. A grand jury is hearing testimony about the shooting. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty says he hasn’t reached any conclusions about charges. Representative Marcia Fudge says the community awaits answers. The Cleveland Democrat issued a statement Sunday saying the case has taken “far too long.”It's about time they got back to that.

The university’s president at the time, Frederick M. Lawrence, called for “discussions about complex and charged issues in a climate of mutual respect and civility.”

But Jones said there is only one black counselor in the school’s Psychological Counseling Center, which makes it hard for students to find someone to whom they feel comfortable speaking about issues involving race.

The university, which had 3,729 undergraduate students in 2014, has a student population that is 48 percent white, 5 percent black, 6 percent Hispanic, and 13 percent Asian, according to the its website.

Founded in 1948, Brandeis was created in defiance of anti-Semitism, according to its website.

Twenty-one years later, the Afro and African-American Studies Department was established after black students occupied Ford Hall, calling for systemic institutional change.Looks like we are heading for quotas at Brandweiss.

The long, controversial reign of Lord Jeff as Amherst College’s unofficial mascot could be coming to an end.

Amid student protests at the elite private school and other campuses calling for racial and social reforms, a group of faculty voted this week to endorse dropping the symbol, given the besmirched reputation of its namesake. Lord Jeffery Amherst, who commanded British forces in North America during the French and Indian War, is believed to have endorsed giving blankets containing the smallpox virus to Native Americans.An early deployment of biological weapons.

The move to dump the lord appears to be gaining momentum as racial tensions heat up on campuses across the country. The protests have been prompted in large part by racial tensions at the University of Missouri last week.

Amherst does not have an official mascot. But the figure of Lord Jeff, who wears a red coat and powdered wig, has been the unofficial symbol since a student wrote a song about him for the glee club in 1906.Let the censoring of history begin!

A group of students called Amherst Rising staged a sit-in at Frost Library on Thursday and presented college president Biddy Martin with a list of demands. They ranged from issuing an apology to students and others “who have been the victims of several injustices, including but not limited to our institutional legacy of white supremacy,” to condemning the “inherent racist nature of the unofficial mascot, the Lord Jeff.”

The group said the protests, which continued through the weekend, were “in solidarity with black college students nationwide who experience the daily effects of white supremacy in academia.”???????

Martin visited with the protesters and met with student organizers. On Sunday, in a letter to the college community, she commended students for speaking out but explained why she believed responding to the demands would be counterintuitive.

Instead, she provided a list of eight commitments aimed at more campus diversity and opportunities for conversation among people from different backgrounds.

“The commitments to freedom of inquiry and expression and to inclusivity are not mutually exclusive, in principle, but they can and do come into conflict with one another,” Martin wrote. “Honoring both is the challenge we have to meet together, as a community. It is a challenge that all of higher education needs to meet.”

There have been various efforts to change the Amherst mascot to a moose, after one wandered into Martin’s backyard last year, or Sabrina, a statue of a nymph that students use for pranks on campus.

One alumnus, Sam A. Mawn-Mahlau, a 1983 graduate, said that in his day, students made fun of Lord Jeff more than anything.

“I don’t think Lord Jeff was for any of the students much of a serious sort of piece of our identification. It was simply a sort of humorous if somewhat problematic symbol,” Mawn-Mahlau, an attorney in Boston, said Wednesday.

He said the mascot should be a penguin, since alumnus Burgess Meredith played the aquatic arch-villain in the 1960s Batman television series and movie.

“We don’t seem to have bigger problems, so we focus on the ones that we’ve got,” Mawn-Mahlau said. “If this is our biggest problem, then we’re doing OK, but frankly who needs the guy?”Yes, the endless wars, future-killing student debt, and rising income inequality isn't a problem on campus these days.

WARNING for European visitors: European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent. As a courtesy, we have added a notice on your blog to explain Google's use of certain Blogger and Google cookies, including use of Google Analytics and AdSense cookies. You are responsible for confirming this notice actually works for your blog, and that it displays. If you employ other cookies, for example by adding third party features, this notice may not work for you. Learn more about this notice and your responsibilities.